The Relationship Between Learning Styles of High School Students and Their Attitudes Towards English

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Thesis Type: Postgraduate

Institution Of The Thesis: Gazi University, Eğitim Bilimleri Enstitüsü, Turkey

Approval Date: 2022

Thesis Language: Turkish

Student: Başak GÖKMEN

Supervisor: Gürcü Erdamar

Abstract:

The objective of this research is to determine the relationship between learning styles of high school students and their attitudes towards English lesson and analyze the correlation between their learning style and attitudes towards English with regard to gender and class level variables. The study is based on a relational survey method as it is designed to look at the relationship between two variables. The study was conducted in a state high school officially attached to Ministry of National Education in Beşiktaş in Istanbul. The study group is composed of 316 students attending a state high school during 2019-2020 academic year. The research data was collected with Inventory of Learning Styles, developed by Kolb (1985) and translated into Turkish by Aşkar & Akkoyunlu (1993) and The Scale of Attitudes towards English Lesson, developed by Kırkız (2010) adapting the attitude scale of GüvenUzman (2006) to English lesson. The arithmetic average, frequency and percentage distributions, independent-samples t-test and one-way variance analysis were employed to analyse the research data. The results of the study reveal that it has been determined that the high school students possess “Converging” learning style the most and “Diverging” the least considering both their gender and class levels. Attitudes of half of the students towards English lesson have been detected high. Besides, it is found that girls, the 12th graders, “Diverging” and “Accommodating” learners have higher attitudes towards English lesson. Teachers’ designing a learning environment considering the students who have different learning styles and choosing topics according to students’ gender, their needs and interests, designing a learning environment in which students in each class levels will be able use English efficiently could be considered some of the important suggestions of this research which will enable students to improve their attitudes towards learning English language.

Key Words : Learning styles, attitudes, gender variable, class level variable, English lesson, high school students.